The Dream of Escape

It was a little breezy, just cool enough. A perfect partly cloudy, Saturday spring afternoon in New York City. Typically, you'd find my partner and me meandering through the Lower East Side, lost in conversations spun from nowhere and everywhere.

On our way to an art fair downtown, he led me into a thrift shop he promised I'd enjoy. Vintage sunglasses, curated jewelry, rare records, all set to a cool playlist. It was perfect. But as I scanned the shelves, I froze.

A ceramic black panther, mid-pounce, claws stretched and fangs bared.

Instantly, I was six years old again, my heart was hammering. I picked it up, and hesitatingly flipped it over—$128, impossibly beyond my $34. Reluctantly, I placed it back on the shelf, but its gaze watched my every move.

Hovering near the sunglasses, pretending casual interest, I tried on pair after pair, hoping a miracle would materialize that would allow me to make that panther mine.

Eventually, inevitability weighed me down, and I stepped outside. The moment he stepped beside me, the words tumbled out: "There was a ceramic black panther in there—exactly like my recurring childhood nightmare! Lock in, because I need to tell you about this dream.”

It always begins the same way.

A warm, bright afternoon in my childhood home on Griffin Street. The light is golden and soft as it pours through the curtains and lands across the walls in glowing rectangles. The stillness feels gentle. It’s the kind of moment that should be safe.

But it isn’t.

Every part of my body already knows. I move slowly, almost floating across the cold linoleum, each step a careful negotiation between silence and the scream building in my throat.

I know she’s here.

The panther.

I can’t see her yet, but I feel her moving through the house. Gliding from kitchen to dining room to living room, always circling. Her coat is thick and black, swallowing every trace of light. I can feel the weight of her gaze. I feel her in my teeth, in my gut, in the rising panic building in my chest.

Her growl is low and steady, so deep I don’t hear it as much as feel it. I want to run, but I don’t move. I’m stuck in the space between knowing I’m being hunted and accepting there’s nowhere to go.

Sometimes she stops. Her ears twitch. Her head tilts toward where I’m hiding, and the air thickens like fog. I hold my breath. I press against the wall. My knees buckle. My body locks. I think maybe this time she’ll walk away.

She never does.

She starts pacing again. Slower. Heavier. She wants me to hear her now. She wants me to know how close she is. She’s playing with me.

She always does.

Then it happens. I step forward without thinking. One small shift, and my heel hits the floorboard under the living room archway. The creak is sharp. Immediate.

Her growl stops mid-breath. The silence is worse than the sound. I know what happens next.

Somehow, the back door appears. I hadn’t noticed it before. Sunlight streams through the patterned glass. It looks like escape.

I don’t think. I run.

Her roar explodes behind me, shaking the foundation of the house. Her claws shred the floor. Her breath scorches the backs of my legs. I throw my body toward the door and reach for the knob.

My fingertips brush it.

Then it’s gone.

My hand slips. My body follows. The floor disappears, and I fall.

The unfinished stairs slam into me as I tumble like a rag doll into blackness and onto the basement floor.

I can’t breathe. The air is heavier down here. Damp. Sour. It clings to my skin like a second layer.

My ears ring. My chest burns. I can’t move.

Then I hear her.

Footsteps. Slow. Heavy. Deliberate.

She’s coming.

I force my eyes upward.

She is there.

Framed in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, the sunlight stretching around her body from the only hope of escape. Her chest rises and falls. Her mouth begins to open.

But it’s her eyes that undo me.

They do not blink. They spin with a feverish light, fractured and endless, like a kaleidoscope turned too fast. The colors are too bright. Too many. Impossible to name or hold. I try to look away. I can’t.

My eyes stay locked, as if they have been claimed. She remembers me.

Then, in slow motion, she leaps.

Her mouth opens wider than anything natural. From deep inside her, a light begins to rise. It starts dim. Flickering. Then brighter. Then blinding. A golden light, rising up her throat, pouring out like fire.

It feels like the end of everything.

And just before she devours me, I wake up.

Drenched. My chest tight. My throat raw with the scream that finally made it out. Sheets tangled around my legs. My body doesn’t know I made it out.

And for a long time, I don’t move. I am still in the basement.

Still waiting for her to appear at the top of the stairs.

I took a deep breath, grounding myself. Revisiting the dream was oddly liberating but still unsettling. 

My boyfriend’s eyes widened. "Wow, baby. That's intense. Have you ever looked up what that dream means?" 

"You know what,” genuinely surprised by my own oversight, "I haven't. But I really should remember to do that."

"Babe, I've got to do my morning pages," I announced, grabbing my notebook. Technically, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way encourages us to do them in the morning, but I'm a night owl, and I prefer evening pages. 

Midway through recapping the events of the day, I suddenly remembered: the panther dream interpretation! Begrudgingly yet practically, I opened ChatGPT and typed out: "You’re the world’s greatest dream interpreter. What resources would you use to effortlessly decode all known meanings and symbolism of someone’s dream? Cite your sources.”

I hit enter, leaned back, and let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.

It was finally time to confront what I had been running from for 30 years.

The Panther

Carl Jung believed predators in dreams were expressions of the Shadow—the parts of ourselves we exile. Rage, grief, instinct, knowing. The panther wasn’t hunting me from the outside. It was rising from within. I had spent years pretending I didn’t feel what I felt, but the dream refused to let me forget.

Jung also spoke of the anima, the inner feminine, untamed and intuitive. That possibility unsettled me more than the fear. What if the panther wasn’t just a threat, but a form of power I had been taught to reject?

Freud might have said it was repressed trauma returning in symbolic form. Adler might have seen it as a response to deep feelings of inferiority. Those interpretations held truth, but none of them captured the full weight of what the dream left behind in my body.

In mythology, the panther takes on many roles. Mayans saw it as a ruler of the underworld. In Greek stories, it followed Dionysus, a god of ecstasy and ruin. Some traditions described it as a protector, others as a shapeshifter, a guide through the unknown. The meanings contradict and blur, but that contradiction felt right.

In my dream, the panther never protected me. It never spoke. It never stopped.

But it always returned.

Over time, I began to wonder if that persistence meant something more. Maybe it wasn’t trying to hurt me. Maybe it was trying to show me who I really was, beneath the fear. Not a threat, but a mirror. Not an end, but a beginning.

Being Hunted

As a child, I had the same nightmare over and over. The panther wasn’t just chasing me. It was chasing something I couldn’t name. It moved through the hallways of my home like it belonged there, like it had always been there, waiting for the right moment to be seen.

Children dream of being chased all the time. It is one of the most common nightmares. But common doesn’t mean harmless. These dreams turn invisible feelings into something we can run from. Helplessness becomes claws. Anxiety becomes footsteps behind us. The fear that lives in the walls of the waking world becomes a creature that won’t stop following.

I couldn’t explain it then, but my body understood. The panther wasn’t just a symbol. It was a warning. It was the shape my fear had to take for me to notice it.

It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from real things. Real threats. Real silences. And it never stopped chasing me until I was ready to turn around and face what it had been trying to show me all along.

Childhood House

In dream work, the house often represents the self. Every room, every hallway, a layer of memory. A private architecture built from emotion, identity, and experience.

My nightmare always took place in my childhood home. It should have been a safe place.

It wasn’t.

The layout never stayed the same. Rooms looped in on themselves. Hallways stretched endlessly, then folded back without warning. What once felt familiar now felt rigged. I would run in circles, chasing escape through a maze that had rewritten its own logic. That kind of dream structure—impossible geometry, liminal spaces that never resolve—speaks to something deeper.

The emotional paralysis of repetition.

The unresolved fears that don’t vanish. They repeat. They trap. Not because we don’t want to move forward, but because we don’t know how.

The back door appeared in every version of the dream. It glowed softly, like an exit. I always ran toward it. I never reached it.

That door was more than a detail. It was a promise I couldn’t keep. A shortcut I desperately wanted to believe in. My mind wanted to find a way out without going through. But the dream wouldn’t let me. Every time I reached for the door, the floor shifted, the hallway twisted, the panther reappeared.

Avoidance never worked.

The house kept turning on itself, and on me. One moment it was familiar. The next, it had swallowed the light. That sudden shift—how safety dissolved into threat—felt truer than anything I could have said aloud at the time.

I see it clearly now. The dream was never just about being chased. It was about the choice I couldn’t make as a child: to flee, or to face what terrified me. My subconscious knew something I didn’t yet have the tools to understand.

Healing would never come from escape. It would only come from turning around.

Falling into the Basement

The back door is in sight. The panther is behind me, gaining ground. I leap toward the knob, hoping I can reach it before it reaches me.

But I miss.

Instead of escape, I fall. My momentum carries me forward and down. I drop into the basement.

I am below, injured and exposed. I can feel the cold of the floor beneath me. I can smell the damp. Nothing is distorted. The basement is exactly how I remember it from waking life. There is no distance. No metaphor.

Just this room. This fall. This failure.

The fall came exactly at the moment I thought I had reached safety.

That pattern—the nearness of escape followed by collapse—echoed something I had lived before I could name it. It wasn’t just about falling. It was about being failed. About trusting a door that would not open. About believing in rescue and finding the opposite.

The panther never needed to chase me after that. I had already done its work for it.

It only had to wait.

Kaleidoscope Eyes and Golden Light Mouth

I didn’t see the panther’s eyes until it appeared at the top of the stairs.

I looked up, already breathless from the fall, and met its gaze.

The pupils didn’t hold color. They held movement. Swirling, shifting patterns like oil on water, like glass shattering and re-forming, like the inside of something alive and changing too fast to understand.

The colors weren’t just bright. They were wrong. Too many at once.

It made my stomach twist. My skin went cold.

I couldn’t look away.

Then its mouth opened.

I braced for pain. For the lunge. For the end.

But instead, I saw light.

A golden glow welled up from its throat. I felt it more than I saw it.

It didn’t feel safe. But it felt true.

Later I would read about Jung’s shadow. About how the things we run from most fiercely are often the parts of ourselves that hold the most power. That inside the threat, if you stay with it long enough, there can be something else. Something you were never meant to destroy. Only recover.

In the dream, I never touched the light. But I saw it. And I knew then that the fear had always been pointing me toward something.

Not just survival. Not just escape.

Recognition.

Sunny Weekend Afternoons

The dream always began in daylight. The kind of Saturday afternoon that should have felt safe. I could see dust drifting in the sunbeams. I could hear the faint sound of kids playing outside. Nothing seemed wrong.

But I knew what was coming.

That was the most disorienting part. The fear didn’t arrive in the dark. It arrived when everything looked fine. The comfort of daylight became a kind of trap. The brightness felt false. Or worse, like a warning.

I used to wonder why the dream always came on weekends. Those were supposed to be the good days. No school. No structure. Just time at home. But maybe that was the problem. There were more chances for the mood to shift, for tension to rise, for something to snap without warning. Maybe I learned to expect danger when everything was supposed to be okay.

My mind remembered the contrast. One moment calm. The next, chaos. 

The dream taught me not to trust the light. Not because the dark was safer, but because the light could vanish so quickly.

That was the real fear. Not monsters. Not even the panther. It was the sudden loss of safety. It was learning that comfort could turn on me.

The Truth

The panther wasn’t just a symbol of fear. It was fear, given form. It was what crept through the house when the shouting started. It was the silence that thickened the air before something broke. It was the instinct to disappear before I even understood why.

My father’s temper. My mother’s volatility. Their fights—whether between them or directed at their children—escalated fast and ended without resolution. The impossible standard of pretending none of it had happened the next day.

There were no bruises I could point to with certainty. But there was confusion. Love that came with conditions. Shame disguised as discipline. Care tangled with control. Unsafe adults invited into my home by the very people who were supposed to protect me.

Nothing steady. Nothing safe.

It was abuse.

The kind that looks like dinner on the table and eyes that refuse to meet yours. Rage followed by denial. Comfort that turns into a trap. A house where you never knew who would come through the door. A family that demanded performance but never presence. That told you to smile, stay small, and be good—even while you were breaking.

And I was breaking.

How do you name harm when it comes from the people who say they love you?

That contradiction lived inside the dream.

The house felt familiar, but wrong. The back door, always just out of reach. The fall, always at the moment I believed I was free.

The panther at the top of the stairs, no longer chasing—because she didn’t have to. I had already put myself in the dark.

Children absorb what they cannot explain. They adapt. They contort themselves into shapes that let them survive.

The dream was a warning. A map. A message.

Something is wrong. You are not safe. Get out.

But I couldn’t. Not yet. I kept having the dream because nothing in my waking life had changed. I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the power.

I grew up in an abusive home.

Not every day. Not in ways you could see. But enough.

Enough to make love feel like walking on glass.
Enough to mistake silence for safety.
Enough to make me perform instead of speak.

The panther never lied to me.

The dream wasn’t distortion. It was my body finding its way back to the place where the truth had been buried. Not to relive it, but to reclaim it.

Night after night, my subconscious returned me to the house, to the hallway, to the stairs, to the moment I fell.

Until I was no longer running. Until I was finally able to turn and face what had been waiting for me all along.

The truth.

The Return

The nightmare stopped when I was seven or eight. After that, it disappeared, like so many things I had to forget in order to survive.

I built a life that looked nothing like where I came from.

I collected gold stars. I performed confidence. I made myself likable, lovable, impressive. I made it all look easy.

But inside, I had no idea who I was.

The confidence was a costume. The joy, a strategy. The life I built was carefully arranged to keep me far from the truth: that I didn’t believe I was worthy of love without condition. That I didn’t know how to be seen without being afraid.

Then the panther came back, and the nightmare returned in full color.

Only this time, I didn’t turn away.

It came to help me remember. To show me what I had buried. What I had lived through. What I had learned to normalize. The panther was never the enemy. She was the guide.

I understand that now.

Because I finally believed I deserved more than survival.

The life I had been living wasn’t mine. It was built from trauma. From loyalty to pain. From the fear that if I stopped performing, I would disappear.

I was done holding myself captive.

Done calling harm love. Done shrinking to make others comfortable. Done choosing silence just because it felt safer than the truth.

So I began again.

I started speaking. I started asking. I started saying no. I started telling the truth. And slowly, I started returning to myself.

The panther returned in my choices. In my boundaries. In my voice.

She shows up every time I speak a truth that once scared me. Every time I stay instead of flee. Every time I take up space and refuse to apologize for it.

What do I have to show for all the years I lost?

I have this life.

I have this voice.

I have this freedom.

And the panther walks with me now.